Hey, fediverse (and bsd.network!)
I want to hear about your formative tech years!
What did you love in years past? What made you think "if we have something like *this* today, the future is certain to be amazing?"
@pamela Learning how to use Microsoft Multiplan. It was revolutionary.
@Wayves It's amazing to me how well early business software still holds up, too. :)
@pamela I had my C64 for ages after. I inherited other family parts, monitor, a second drive, software. I kept using thru high school for homework despite having access to a lab of Apple IIes. I think it was amazing that 1 keyboard unit could be expanded from cartridge to tape drive, to disk drive. I miss that. The phone I'm using to toot this on is built for obsolescence.
@sikkdays that has definitely been a change for the worse. I miss hardware designed to last in general!
@pamela connecting my laptop to SprintPCS blazing fast (144Kbps!) 1xRTT mobile network and connecting to IRC while my friend was driving down the 405 freeway (why yes I am Californian why do you ask) was a big moment for me.
Fast internet without wires seemed like a real good first step towards a Star Trek like universe, at the time.
* free of marginal charge
@notclacke @phessler @aag :D As often as tech disappoints, that personal connection is like nothing else! :)
I embraced the TRS-80 from Radio Shack as a young teacher. I hoped that, over time, ALL my colleagues would join in seeing it as a great tool for student learning. Instead, the few who grasped onto it generally used it for PowerPoint.
I still have hope, however.
@Algot Those were such neat machines. :D I love how ridiculously popular they became... the public *wanted* computers in our lives, probably for all kinds of different reasons, but the hunger was there!
@pamela I was playing a financial simulator on C64. The loader was written in assembler but one day the game crashed and I was back in BASIC and I could do a list. Turns out the whole game was written in BASIC, and I could change it!
So I read all the code, while learning BASIC (well, while learning programming) and found the what I would call these days the random number generator. I changed it to make me always win.
From there on out I was more interested in coding than playing.
@florian XD I used to do this, too! Or change whatever I wanted while typing in programs I found in books or magazines, and then spend ages stamping out the problems I'd introduced. :)
Having control over how things appeared and worked was really appealing, and a great way to learn and try more things.
@pamela oh god, so many bits.
Probably playing around with ResEdit to the point where I'm changing the games I played. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
In short, I spent far too much time trying to do stupid things to computers. I still do.
@phessler the fine tradition of digging your fingers in and pulling :D
🤔 that last bit would be great on a business card
@pamela I had a TI-99/4A my parents bought me at the tender age of five. I was so into that thing, learning hex before most kids knew their alphabets so I could make my own sprites, making all kinds of games.
I still have the tattered Extended BASIC manual on my bookshelf, but the computer was sadly lost to Mom's attic.
@zigg I wish we each still had our old games to exchange :D
@pamela Both systems live on in emulation! I was pretty impressed with a TI emulator I tried once!
@pamela A computing architecture (CPU/hardware, OS, programming language, etc) that a single person could understand from top to bottom.
@ed1conf I definitely agree on this. :D
@pamela I spent the entirety of the year in my high school physics class writing an RPG engine in TI-BASIC.
By the end of that year it rocked lol. Had support for moving the party around a world map, random battles, stats, inventory, NPCs with dialog. All it needed was a story >.<
To this day, I know zero physics.
@bcallah That sounds super fun, and I totally would have used it given the chance :D
@pertho I love how many of us had a lot of the same experiences, just sitting and writing code and carefully thinking things through, all within similar timeframes. :D
@notclacke ohhhh and I had many happy hours playing with music and sound thanks to them :)
@pamela
When I read Neuromancer back in the '80s
@jak3b that series changed my idea of how I wanted to experience day-to-day reality, which is pretty profound when you think about it! :D
@pamela Long distance calls to CompuServe to play a space battle game.
@bitgeist I don't miss the bills, but wow, CompuServe was amazing :D
Descent was a big one for me. Seeing games starting to look like the world, and wondering if we could make the world look like the games!
@pamela
I didn't really get to experience computers and the internet until Windows XP was dominating the market, so what wound up sending me down into this Wonderland was playing countless hours of the "Megaman: Battle Network" series games on my GameBoy Advance. The idea of whole worlds full of information readily accessible, just waiting to be explored has fascinated me ever since.
@newnix this is also how I look at things. Around every corner, something I don't know and have never seen. :D
@pamela Sure makes life a hell of a lot more fun, always learning something, building something, breaking something
@pamela the Nintendo Power Glove was a big one for me - I was convinced that amazing worn interfaces were going to be everywhere, each trying to outdo the rest. Some of the current gen AR is getting close to what I wanted the 1990s to be ;)
@djsundog this is also the future I choose :D
@pamela I remember buying these slim little books that each contained an AppleSoft basic game that you could type in. I distinctly remember buying one that had a space invaders game and that was my first foray into programming when I was like 8. I can’t imagine a better introduction to computing :)
I still have not quite come to terms with my failure to realize my ambition to write a Z80 assembler for my Timex Sinclair 1000.
@pamela Pong. I'll never forget when my dad brought it home and hooked it up to the TV. I was probably about 7 or 8, so 1979-80? It blew my mind.
@hfrazey so simple, and yet such a leap forward :D
Napster. Going from listening to country/pop music because that's really all you could find on the radio to + mail order CDs you had no idea what they were before you bought them to... being able to sample the entire world's musical various cultures and subcultures as soon as you heard of it...you could tell not only that things like dubstep & machinae supremacy were in the pipe...but that everything outside of music was going to be different after that.
@jeffcliff oh heck yes! Napster completely changed my relationship with music! I tried something new almost every day for a long time... and it was definitely the first time I felt able to see trends forming and watch those musical ideas spread.
@pamela i spent a lot of time reading user manuals so i could do silly things like customize the dos prompt. i was most fascinated by the internet though. we had an early voice/text chat program that i used to talk to other kids in, like, australia
@pamela i loved crawling search engine results and finding weird websites too. every site had "cool links" type pages and webrings were amazing for discoverability in the days before google
@wolfteeth the hand-curated pages of links were always fantastic! I actually really miss those :D
@pamela I grew up poor, so my first programming experience (if it can be called that) was an N64 and one of those “cheat cartridges”.
Turns out you can learn a surprising amount of things with only a breakpoint debugger and hex editor disguised as a toy, no instructions or prior knowledge, and too much free time.
@pamela (it sounds silly, but the fact I could *change* things that were previously to me set in stone was mind-expanding at the time)
@flussence it sounds awesome, not silly :D that moment of realizing tech can be truly interactive is an eye-opener for sure!
being able to pick apart things I enjoy and put them back together differently still holds lots of appeal for me :)
@flussence @kurtm @pamela this is almost exactly my first experience
Interesting questions.
I would also have liked to have more supportive family members growing up.
Strict with tech use (ie restricting Internet access overall) or not having another computer to share with kinda put a damper on some projects I had when I was a teen especially, with others.
Also living in a rural area so not a lot of opportunities real life.
So I think that amazing part that would affect others in the future are like generic IRL things.
@superruserr I was also a rural kid...but tech was my ticket out. Sometimes just looking forward to it being more a part of daily life was a fun look into the future. :D
@pamela I was a member of the local Explorer Scouts Computer branch. (They let me in a bit early. Technically I was too young).
I got to use Data General computers. I got to use a color terminal. (No idea which type now). I drew a Tardis and got to print it out on a plotter! This was junior high.
The most mind-blowing part was I had a pen pal in AUSTRALIA. This was like 1985. It was fucking MINDBLOWING to exchange emails with someone on the other side of the planet.
He was "The Wizard of Aus"
@kurtm ~~~it's still mind-blowing~~~
:D
@pamela #2
My cousing Chris had an Atari 800XL with an Atari 1010 casette recorder. I had used Apple computers at school (another story to tell), but the Atari was mind blowing. It had a blue background for basic. There was a black and white "Atari Basic Reference for Experienced Programmers" pamphlet that I used to bridge my knowledge of Apple BASIC to the Atari. It told me how to use the Joystick.
I created a program that pretended to be the controls for a Tardis. The joystick opened the door
For me, it was a C64 in our basement and a subscription to Loadstar. Getting the chance to try out so much of what other people had made, hundreds or thousands of miles away? There were some absolute treasures, delivered right to my mailbox, that changed my whole idea of what computers could be. 😍